There'll always be an England

Maybe the Gareth Southgate years were an aberration and there has not been a revolution. Thomas Tuchel's England look a lot like previous incarnations

England made history on Wednesday night as, for the first time, they lost to African opposition, going down 3-1 to Senegal in a friendly at the City Ground. In truth, it was freakish that their unbeaten 21-game record against CAF sides had lasted so long. While there was plenty of understandable frustration about the performance, there was no sense of humiliation at the end of the unblemished run; it was well overdue. The feeling rather was of familiarity: it’s taken a while, but it can probably now definitively be said that we’ve got our England back.

The last two games have been the England we remember, huffing and puffing fruitlessly away, while being disconcertingly open in midfield. It’s not even as though this Senegal side has been in particularly good form recently. With four games remaining, they lie second behind DR Congo in World Cup qualifying, and they were held to a goalless draw by Sudan in March. But they looked much sharper and brighter that England, tearing through the midfield over and over again.

It's not particular slight on Declan Rice to say that he has begun to look like the characteristic England midfielder, chiselled, enthusiastic, put-upon, a player of tremendous stamina who is always having to make desperate bursts to close down space because somebody, often himself, has got out of position. This is what Scott Murray described in The Blizzard as the Roy of the Rovers syndrome that has held England back for years, the belief that one dynamic driving player from midfield would do something brilliant at the last to save the day (as Bryan Robson and Steven Gerrard often did), that faith obviating the need for a balanced structure that could control games.

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On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we consider the career of Luis Enrique and later in the week we’ll be remembering Zambia’s tear-jerking Africa Cup of Nations victory of 2012. Listen here.

On Libero, we discuss Italy sacking Spalletti, the weird status of the Nations League, travel bans and riots, and the difficulties of getting the games in the US. Listen here.

Issue 57 of The Blizzard is out now, featuring Ivica Osim and the death of Yugoslavia, football in Cornwall, how punk was shaped by terrace chants, the development of the Bhutanese league and the Liverpool striker who lost a leg and became a stunt diver. Buy here.

And, ever wanted the history of football tactics explained in one gorgeous poster? Or the Premier League as Fibonacci sequence? Then you’re in luck. Buy here.

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Ken Early speaks often of something similar on the Second Captains podcast, how there is a debilitating obsession among the English pundit class with the idea that midfielders should score goals when Paris Saint-Germain just won the Champions League with a brilliant midfield trio that got two goals between them from open play in the knockout stage. It’s why English football culture struggles to produce deep-lying ball-playing midfielders. And when it does occasionally produce them, it often fails to appreciate them.